Chainfire Takes Step Forward to Root Galaxy S3

Galaxy S3 Root Achieved Remotely

Developer Chainfire always returns back with a bang and this time he has actually banged the Android development field. We just received the news that Galaxy S3 is rooted! Yes, even though Chainfire does not have this device in his hands, he could root it remotely. However, you don’t have to be too surprised on this. These things have happened even before. Many times flagship Android models have been rooted even before the launch. This is something that has joined the bandwagon.

People without knowledge of coding environment would surely feel surprised due to this. But things are far advanced than we actually think and thus developer Chainfire achieving successful rooting for Samsung Galaxy S3 is something we got to believe.

According to Chainfire the process wasn’t that tough. It required some adjustments including:

Manual installation of SuperUser

Reloading Kernel

Altering ADB Binary

Mind well again, Chainfire did not actually have the handset in his hands. He took advantage of the build that was leaked for Samsung Galaxy S3. He virtually rooted the phone based on the build and making some manual adjustments.

In this link you will be able to watch the interview of Developer Chainfire.

“ Unfortunately, I am not able to share the “insecure” kernel with you at the moment, because of fears it is traceable to the leaker (this is said to be the last traceable firmware revision). This root is, as expected, trivial. It was a simple matter of repacking the stock kernel, with a modified adbd binary that thinks ro.secure=0 (even if ro.secure=1). This gives access to all adb root commands (see screenshots). Then SuperSU was installed manually.

Kernel – The modification was trivial, because this time around, Samsung is using the standard boot.img format, instead of the zImage format used for SGS1, SGS2, SGNote, etc, that is much harder to repackage.

Recovery – The recovery partition is also being used this time around. And thus we can flash recoveries separately from the kernel.

Bootloaders – There was no warning triangle at boot-up after flashing the modified kernel, but download mode did show a custom kernel flash counter which increased. Whether or not flashing a custom recovery also triggers this counter is as of yet unknown.

Final note – This was all tested on a current (release candidate) SGS3 firmware. There may be a newer firmware on true retail/production devices. Though some things may change, it is unlikely to change much. Let’s hope nothing. Also, Triangle Away did not work. They have hidden the boot partitions again as on the latest SGNote firmwares.”

This was a rocking thing Chainfire did for the community. We thank him for the contribution and expect similar things for future.